HABITAT

There's a switch in my room.  There are three points on it.

When I turn it once, my room becomes a raucous cafe.  Revelers swinging off of out-of-tune pianos, splashing drinks and dropping cigarettes on sequined dresses and dusty tuxedos.  The bartender argues and laughs with an earthy passion at everyone who comes by, shouting, demanding drinks, coffee, food, whatever fleeting dream it may be.  People holler like madmen at their old friends when they come through the glass door, out of the pouring rain outside, where the smoke lifts out of the manhole, dragged along underneath the speeding taxis and classic cars, heading out into the dark streets, slick with rain and orange with lamplight.  My chair is in the corner of this living Toulouse-Lautrec, with my notebook, my pen, my eye, my friends.

When I turn the switch again, the life is pulled straight out of the room, rushing out of the glass door and down the street, except now it is a wooden door and the street is a long field, so the life gets lost and disperses through the rolling grass.  The harvest moon looks at me through the window, mixing its glancing light with the warm glow of the gas lamp at my desk.  Chick-a-dill, chick-a-dill go the cicadas, the crickets, the wandering spirits outside who never knock but only pass.  My pen, scratchily scurrying, sounds like the footfalls of insects.  Maybe there's a slumbering dog (a husky, a bloodhound) slouched on the corded rug next to the fireplace, dying embers.  It kicks at the hardwood floor.  Every moment is the one that threatens to send me sagging into my chair, into the desk, stumbling under the flannel sheets, last fleeting thought maybe it will snow tomorrow before i

The third switch turns it off.  It's a room with white walls, with a maple floor.  Two windows are open, the curtains fluttering with an unstated promise.

I don't know what to put in there.